On 12/30/2014 6:41 PM, Josh Reynolds wrote:
I agree with about 50% of this.
All of the products I know of that run trill or spb or support several
MEF levels are Linux based that are driving FPGAs.
You also have stuff like this: http://www.cs.helsinki.fi/u/sklvarjo/y1731/
If you look at cumulus networks, their Linux based stack is driving
data center network virtualization forward by giving you a common
software platform on abstracted hardware. None of it is MEF, but
saying Linux has stagnated on the general network front isn't
accurate. It does lack a decent open source carrier stack though,
including the MEF pieces and things like MPLS. Thankfully some vendors
have stepped into that space... For a price.
I'm not saying that Linux can't play a role. But the ones you're
describing (like Cumulus) are proprietary hardware products using
embedded Linux to perform some, not all, of the functions. RouterOS,
EdgeOS, fooWRT, and similar OSs are however just Linux, using built-in
Linux routing capabilities. And even that is in an entirely different
direction from MEF; data center stuff is still connectionless MAC or IP
switching. So it's not that Linux isn't present in all sorts of places;
it's just that Linux isn't bringing CE to the party.
The actual forwarding protocols for Carrier Ethernet don't seem to have
been implemented for Linux. At least not in the open kernel. So they're
not available to the dirt-cheap Linux router market that WISPs like.
I do hope we can get some RINA stuff into circulation though; fully
baked (and this hasn't all been coded yet), it is a functional superset
of both CE, MPLS, IP, and IPsec, among other things, with a much smaller
footprint.
On December 30, 2014 2:19:40 PM AKST, Fred Goldstein
<[email protected]> wrote:
On 12/30/2014 5:05 PM, Mike Hammett wrote:
How many WISPs have heard of MEF or CE or even VPLS?
So... have you asked for it yet? :-p
[email protected]
I may have once asked somebody from MT about it, maybe at a show,
and they gave the predicted answer, that they're a *router*
company. Sort of like DEC, which was a inicomputer company.
Of course MEF has a lot of specs now. They aren't all critical,
but support for the basic connection types, with QoS, is what
matters. But this is foreign to the whole Linux-router market.
Linux is a fossil of the early 1990s, when eye pee was still sort
of the new thing, and everything else was assumed to be the enemy,
or the eeevull telephone company. RouterOS is basically a lot of
lipstick on top of Linux. That world still assumes that
connectionless is next to godliness, that QoS is impossible, and
that Ethernet is orange hose tied together with MAC-table bridges.
For those unfamiliar with it, Carrier Ethernet, which is
standardized by the Metro Ethernet Forum, uses the Ethernet frame
format to provide a wide range of services that aren't bridging.
There's point to point Ethernet Private Line, there's PtMP
Ethernet Virtual Private Line, and there's MPtMP LAN emulation.
It's usually connection-oriented, using the VLAN tag as the
connection ID, not the MAC. It offers CIR+EIR support ("three
color"). It is protocol-agnostic to higher layers. It is
manageable. And with the new SPB, it has OSPF routing between
network elements, not just RSTP.
In other words, it's Ethernet Formatted Frame Relay. And that's
good; it's an improvement over the original slow telco FR. It's
the fastest-growing area in telecom (it's the new standard for
cellular backhaul, for instance). But it's not ideologically part
of the Linux/IP family, and people from that world (which includes
most WISP suppliers) neither understand it nor understand why it's
needed.
--
Fred R. Goldstein k1io fred "at" interisle.net
Interisle Consulting Group
+1 617 795 2701
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Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
--
Fred R. Goldstein k1io fred "at" interisle.net
Interisle Consulting Group
+1 617 795 2701
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